The Philosopher

Tuesday, 8 August 2017

Now I’m all in favour with popularising philosophy - but
surfing? It doesn’t auger well. Surfing and philosophy seems to go
together like... chalk and cheese. Of course, there is a very broad kind
of philosophy of life that well, surfers could be said to symbolise -
but against this small justification is the uncomfortable fact that
surfing is a physical sport which has very little to do with philosophy.
Indeed, Sartre was writing in the years before surfing became a
mainstream leisure pursuit. It really doesn’t help, as here, to suppose
that ‘had’ he known surfing he would have liked it.

In fact, it turns out that there is very little in Sartre that does fit with Aaron James’s
surfing philosophy, so it is clearly more a marriage of convenience than
of substance. Nonetheless, James does manage to use surfing to provide a
framework to explore big Sartrean (better, ‘existentialist’) issues
such as freewill, determinism, and of course, the meaning of life. James
even goes so far to say:

‘It would be an
exaggeration to say that the whole meaning of human existence could be
continued in one moment, in a single act of riding a wave, yet is it as though the whole meaning of human existence can be contained in one
moment, in a single act of riding a wave. ‘

And,
philosophically speaking, Surfing with Sartre is a clear and
well-informed guide, whose choices of examples are often illuminating.

‘This
is a book of philosophy. It asks whether the surfer might happen to
know something about questions for the ages, about knowledge, freedom,
control, flow, happiness society, nature and the meaning of life. It’s a
book about surfing, but also not, or not just, because the surfer
knows, or at least sense, without necessarily caring, turns out to be of
world-historical moment, for nothing less than the future of work, the
planet, and human civilization.’

Paddling his
board out further, James even suggests that the surfer is ‘a model of
civic virtue’. This is partly because, if we all worked a lot less, say a
24-hour week, ‘the climate crisis would be less terrible’. James notes
that, of course, not working could include other activities than surfing
such as gardening or ‘spending time with the kids ‘. (That might offend
some moms – and he doesn’t include being a philosophy professor in the
‘not really working’ category)

‘The question
is one of ethics’, he continues firmly. Surfers are revolutionaries.
Leisure revolutionaries. Speaking of revolutions reminds him of Sartre,
who was of course a Marxist. Marxists used to link work with identity,
but James argues that this is old thinking and that instead, surfers are
‘on the side of history’ by creating their identity though their
leisure pursuit.

He explains a bit more about
this by saying that surfing is not about imposing your will, but
transcending it. To surf a wave is described thus:

1. To be attuned to a changing natural phenomenon,2. so as to be carried along by its propulsive forces by way of bodily adaptation,3. where this is done purposefully and for its own sake.

In this is a ‘kind of freedom, self-transcendence, and happiness’.

‘I
realize this might sound like some mash-up of surf camp musings and
philosophical blathering’, says James apologetically, in a rare moment
of doubt - and for me, he’s not far wrong!

Indeed,
rather vainglorious accounts of how to surf dominate the book. Learn
how to fade, snap, cutback, anticipate and tube ride. This last
maneouvere, it turns out, is surfer nirvana. If you want to know more
about it - buy the book. If you want to know more about Sartre, the same
advice does not apply.

James briefly reports
that both W. V. Quine and Peter Strawson - ‘the two towering figures
who later did the most to undo logical empiricism’ - ‘dabbled’ in
surfing. However, more space is given to John Rawls who James crowns
‘the 20th century’s most influential philosopher’. What, not Sartre? Or
any others from a whole range of non-surfing thinkers including Edmund
Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein? Nonetheless, both of these get regular
nods here.

James examines the different kinds of freedom possible.

‘Freedom
for the surfer isn’t radical self-determination but a kind of
achievement, in adaptive attunement. It’s a way of being efficacious
without control, precisely by giving up any need for it.’

Think
of the kind of freedom described by John Locke with his example of the
man in a locked room. The man is not truly free, even if he has no with
to leave the room - even if he does not know the door is locked. But no,
it is not this kind of freedom. Surfers exhibit freedom, but it is more
than ‘freedom from’ - it is freedom to do something. Is it then more
like that offered by Sartre’s compatriot and fellow existentialist,
Albert Camus? He reinvented the tale of Sisyphus in order to have the
hero pushing the rock up the hill - for eternity- in an act of defiance.

Indeed,
James says radical freedom, Sartre’s kind of freedom, isn’t necessary. A
person can ‘be carried along by necessity, going along with the flow of
the universe and yet be free’. Noting that the ‘concept of control
sweeps away the workings of fate and fortune’, the surfer’s answer is
that we have less control that we usually imagine.

James
segues to consider toilets, which he rightly sees as marvellous things
and wrongly insists we only have thanks to the emergence of probability
theory and statistical analysis. (I still haven’t worked that one out
yet… )

‘In sum, then the surfer wisdom for
success as a person is this. Take it easier. Accept. Persist. Focus,
Leave time. Don’t compare. And mix things up.’

Mix
things up? But yes. Freedom means that the ‘average Joe ‘can strike up a
conversation with a pretty girl lying on the beach’, muses James. On
the other hand, it does seem to mix things up to say that by ‘the light
of surfer reason’, it is not permissible ‘to lie in bed when the waves
are pumping.’ Not here the transcendence of surfers. Nor indeed is there
much evidence of transcendence in an imagined surfer dispute: ‘You
snaked me, bro! No way, you go fuck yourself, bro. Let’s take it to the
beach, bro!’

But, okay, let’s do that, let’s
take it to the beach. Because, in fact, I’ve done quite a lot of
swimming with surfers, and while I’m sure they’re generally very nice
chaps (they are nearly all men) frankly, I don’t share James’s
glorification of the project. The surfers I see are sitting on the their
boards for hours on end just chatting and waiting for a middling swell
to come in, at which point they may or may not balance precariously on
their boards.

Secondly, and more
substantially, in my observation, surfing is all about the gaze of the
other. This is indeed a great existentialist theme, first discussed, not
only by Sartre, but by his partner of many years, Simone de Beauvoir,
who being a woman barely rates in surfer philosophy.

Surfing
is indeed distinctive in the importance attached to the image of the
ride on the wave: it is not enough for the one surfer to have the
pleasure and the thrill all alone. Often surfers are accompanied by
their own cameraman/ woman who sites placidly on the beach waiting,
maybe for hours, to immortalise their glorious moment. But even if there
is not camera, is it not significant that surfers do prefer to operate
in company, and if they cannot do that, to be within the gaze of humble
beach dwellers?

In all these ways surfing may
indeed tell us something about the relationship of the individual and
their milieu. But I ‘m not sure it is anything very much. It is thus for
Aaron James to convince us that Surfing with Sartre is more than a
personal conceit, more than an ornate folly constructed by an academic
philosopher who happens to be a keen surfer.

Surfing
and philosophy do seem to me, despite his protestations, to be
completely different kinds of activities. That’s not to discount the
value of surfing though. James disagrees with Mill’s division of higher
and lower pleasures without appreciating that his specific target was
‘pushpin’, a kind of gambling, and there’s no reason to think that Mill
would not have appreciated the aesthetics of life on the ocean wave –
just as he appreciated the noble landscapes of the English Lake
District. I think Mill might have appreciated body surfing, but been suspicious of hours spent waiting for a tube roll. And I suspect Mill
would, unlike James, have thought that the poet Baudelaire was on to
something when he wrote that: ‘to reduce everything to a single truth,
work is less boring than pleasure’.

Sartre
tells us that we are condemned to absurdity. That view would perhaps
seem absurd to a surfer. Indeed, James favours the ‘surfer-friendly’
conclusion ‘that we face *too much* meaning. There are too many things
worth doing!

On the contrary, generically, as
Sartre wrote in a digression in his novel Nausea (1938), life doesn’t
make sense. This ‘bad faith’ is its ‘secret power’. What else do we have
in life other than the ‘spurious meanings’ that we invent?

‘Descartes
shut himself in an egocentric cage, and like Sartre he struggled to
escape. But the door was always open, if one puts the body first. To
perceive is to know how to engage what lies beyond one’s head.
Perception is not simply located in the brain.’

True knowledge comes,
for James, anyway, from the existential feel of those tube rides.

*Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of MeaningBy Aaron James

Doubleday, 2017ISBN-10: 0385540736

The
Philosopher’s verdict: Intriguing, but still not really suitable for the beach.